Why Scernetta exists
It started out of curiosity. We deal with tachographs ourselves and wanted to understand what is actually in the .ddd file that the download device produces, without needing somebody else's program every time. So we took the public EU specification, which describes the file format down to the last byte, and started writing our own parser.
Along the way two things struck us about the programs we had been using until then. They only ever show the one file you have just opened, although a download covers only a few weeks and the month before that sits in another file. And when the card was not inserted for a while, some of them calculate violations for exactly that time, although there is no data for it at all. We thought both were wrong, and we did both differently. Scernetta lays all of a driver's downloads over each other and shows the whole period, and where there is no data it says “not assessable”.
At some point the side project turned into a program that other people can use too, and by now there is an on-prem API that brings the same engine as a container into a company network.
One thing mattered to us from the start. Card data is personal data and the analysis concerns people, so everything runs on-prem, on the computer where the files are. There is no server of ours that anything gets uploaded to.
The name
Scernetta is a coined name inspired by two Latin ideas: scindere, meaning “to split” or “cut apart”, and cernere, meaning “to separate, sift, distinguish, or discern”. Together, those ideas reflect exactly what the software is built to do: take complex tachograph data, separate it into meaningful structures, interpret it, and turn raw .ddd files into information that can actually be understood and used. The ending “-etta” was chosen to give the name a more distinctive and memorable character.
DDD is the file format of tachograph downloads, and anyone who works with it knows the extension on sight.
How we check
We compare Scernetta with the established software on an ongoing basis. On the activity timeline, meaning the sequence of activities, the agreement is over 99%, on work shifts it is 99.8%. We also checked the rules engine against the text of the law itself, passing 317 of 318 test cases, not just against other programs.
Where the programs disagree with each other, we do not know either who is right. That is why Scernetta shows both views side by side. To date, over 4,600 real card files have been processed without errors.
If you have questions, just write to us, we answer ourselves and usually quickly.